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Flood Basalt Volcanism in the Northwestern United States

  • Chapter
Continental Flood Basalts

Part of the book series: Petrology and Structural Geology ((PESG,volume 3))

Abstract

Flood basalt volcanism in the northwestern U.S. is but one manifestation of the magmatically active western boundary of the North American Plate. This activity relates directly to the convergence between the North American Plate and various oceanic plates to the west. Prior to the Oligocene-early Miocene, convergence was manifest by characteristically calc-alkaline volcanism and plutonism in western North America associated with subduction zone magma genesis (e.g. Lipman et al., 1972). Roughly 30 My ago, collision between the North American plate and the East Pacific Rise began to convert this consumptive plate boundary to the strike-slip motion now evident as the San Andreas fault system (Atwater, 1970). Accompanying the transition from the compressional, subduction related tectonics to the extensional regime now characteristic of the Basin and Range province, the character of the volcanic products in the western U.S. shifted from predominantly calc-alkaline to bimodal basalt-rhyolite (e.g. Lipman et al., 1972; Christiansen and Lipman, 1972; Christiansen and McKee, 1978).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC, 20015, USA

    Richard W. Carlson

  2. Department of Geology, Miami University, Oxford, OH, 45056, USA

    William K. Hart

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  1. Richard W. Carlson
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, California, USA

    J. D. Macdougall

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Carlson, R.W., Hart, W.K. (1988). Flood Basalt Volcanism in the Northwestern United States. In: Macdougall, J.D. (eds) Continental Flood Basalts. Petrology and Structural Geology, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7805-9_2

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